Lieberman(InPress)Neuroleadership

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IN PRESS,Neuroleadership

The Brains Braking System

(and how to use your words to tap into it)

Matthew D. Lieberman

University of California, Los Angeles

Main Text Word Count: 4020

Correspondence should be addressed to:

Matthew LiebermanDepartment of Psychology1285 Franz Hall, UCLALos Angeles, CA 90095-1563email: [email protected]


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I dragged myself out of bed. I made myself go to the gym. I kept my cool anddid not yell at my boss (even though I really wanted to). Our capacity for self-control isunquestionably one of the things that separates man from the beasts and yet, like mostpsychological capacities, it is typically taken for granted. This capacity is unique,complex, and responsible for most human accomplishments being accomplishments

rather than half-baked ideas that never leave the drawing board. Self-control allows us topersist in the face of other appealing options and to adapt rather than being slaves to ourimpulses.

It may also get you into the college of your choice. In the 1970s, Walter Mischelran a series of studies in which he confronted young children with a straightforwarddilemma: you can have one marshmallow now or any time before I return by ringing thisbell or you can wait until I return and Ill give you two marshmallows. There areadorable videos of the children doing everything they can to resist chowing down on theone marshmallow that is already sitting in front of them. Just like adults, childrenlogically know that two is better than one and so they want to wait it out. But you cansee they are fighting against something: themselves. And who wins this battle of the

selves (the self who wants immediate gratification vs. the self who appreciates the bigpicture) has real consequences. Those children who were able to wait the full 15 minuteswent on to score more than 200 points higher on their SATs a decade later than thosewho immediately gobbled up the first marshallow. Self-control at age five sets you on acareer to greater or lesser success for the rest of ones life.

At first blush, the kind of self-control needed to resist marshmallows seems verydifferent than the kind of self-control involved in performing well on standardized tests.However, neuroscientists are demonstrating how disparate forms of self-control all relyon a common neural mechanism. Indeed, the kinds of self-control that depend on thissystem vary much more widely than the marshmallow and SAT cases. Imagine drivingin a foreign country where they drive on the opposite side of the road from you. Thistakes enormous motor self-control to override your normal driving habits. At the otherextreme of the self-control spectrum, imagine watching a sporting event with someonewho is rooting for the team you are rooting against. Trying to take this personsperspective on the event also involves great self-control as you try to inhibit your ownway of seeing things. Motor self-control and perspective-taking self-control are asdifferent as can be and yet both of these rely on the same neural mechanism.

The rest of this paper will proceed in three sections. First, I will discuss theregion that is common to various forms of self-control, a brain region called rightventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), and summarize some of the evidencedemonstrating this regions contribution. Second, I will explore an unexpectedconsequence of this regions role in the brains braking system in a study from our labthat suggests that when we try to engage in a targeted form of self-control (e.g. motorself-control) we may unintentionally induce self-control in other domains (e.g. emotionalself-control) because the brains braking system will regulate all kinds of impulses whenit is active. Third, I will discuss how putting feelings into words can unintentionally tapinto this RVLPFC self-control system and how certain forms of mental training likemeditative practice can improve the effectiveness of this system. From my ownperspective, the first section highlights something that fMRI does particularly well: showthat psychological processes that feel quite different from one another can share a


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common neural bases. This sets up and helps explain the interesting but paradoxicalphenomena that follow.

Varieties of Self-control

Motor Self-controlThe neural basis of self-control has been studied most extensively in the domainof motor self-control. Anytime your body seems to want to do one thing but you knowyou need to do another, thats motor self-control. Driving on the opposite side of theroad in foreign countries is certainly one kind of self-control, but scientists use a muchsimpler analog of this to study motor self-control within the confines of an MRI scanner.Typically, neuroscientists will use some variant of of ago-nogo task.

In a typical go-nogo task, participants see a series of letters appear on thecomputer screen one at a time (i.e. each letter replaces the one that was there before it).For any letter that appears other than one particular letter (e.g. R), the participant isinstructed to hit a button. These are thego trials and usually 80% or more of the trials in

a go-nogo study are go trials. These occur about one every second and so a participantgets into a rhythm of tapping the same button once a second. In other words, a buttonpressing habit forms and the brains tendency to want to keep pressing the button isdescribed as aprepotent response. Nearly all forms of self-control involve overridingsome kind of prepotent response (i.e. a response the brain assumes should follow and thusis prepared to make) and in motor self-control this is certainly the case. This is where thenogo trials come in. Every so often (but not too often), the R appears and when thishappens, the participant is instructed to not press a button. For the participant doing thetask, this feels decidedly like withholding a response, the prepotent response that was allready to go.

This task and others that are conceptually similar (e.g. stop-signal task) have nowbeen examined dozens of times with fMRI. Results to vary a bit from study to study, butthe one near constant across these studies is that RVLPFC is more active during nogotrials (when self-control is needed) than during go trials. Other regions have certainlybeen observed as well including left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), supplementarymotor area and basal ganglia. As I discuss each different kind of self-control you shouldbear in mind that there are always networks of brain regions involved. My main point inthis section is simply that RVLPFC is the one brain region that seems to be present acrossall of the different kinds of self-control.

Demonstrating that particular brain regions are active during a particular form ofself-control is important but it does not tell us whether those brain regions are actuallydoing anything necessary to have successful self-control occur. Examining patients withbrain damage, with lesions to particular brain structures, can help remedy this situation.Adam Aron conducted the best neuropsychological study of motor self-control to date inorder to figure out what brain structures are truly necessary for motor self-contro. Aronand colleagues (Aron et al., 2003) examined behavior performance on a stop-signal taskin a variety of patients with damage in different brain regions. The extent of damage indifferent brain regions was related to performance on the motor self-control task and onlydamage in RVLPFC predicted impaired performance on the task. No other damage in thebrain was associated with task impairment.


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Thus, the evidence for RVLPFC involvement in motor self-control is clear anduncontroversial. It shows up in nearly every fMRI study and it is the one region that hasbeen causally linked to motor self-control deficits in patients with brain damage.

Cognitive Self-control

There are many fewer studies of cognitive self-control than there are of motorself-control. During cognitive self-control, individuals try to modulate their ownthoughts in terms of what does or does not come to mind or tries to influence how onethought or belief might influence other cognitive processes that logically should be keptseparate. At this point we can say that a number of these studies (though not all) suggestRVLPFC involvement in cognitive forms of self-control.

In one study (Mitchell et al., 2007), participants were instructed to try not to thinkof a white bear. This turns out to be a very challenging task (try it!), but whileparticipants were doing this rather than engaged in free thinking they generated increasedactivity in RVLPFC. Similarly, in another study (Depue, Curran, & Banich, 2007),individuals learned to associate pairs of pictures together and later were shown one

picture and asked not to think of the other and their success at this was associated withRVLPFC activity.In a different kind of study, Goel and Dolan (2003) examined the capacity to

inhibit a belief in order to provide the logical answer to question. In their study,participants were shown syllogisms and had to indicate whether the conclusion logicallyfollowed from the premises. Critically, a conclusion can logically follow from thepremises even if the premises are not actually true. For instance, if you were shown thesyllogism: (1) Only expensive things are addictive, (2) Cigarettes are inexpensive, (3)Therefore, cigarettes are not addictive. Logically, the conclusion follows from thepremises even though the first premise is false. In order to answer this questionaccurately, one must suppress the belief that the conclusion is factually false. Whenindividuals in the study were able to suppress their belief and provide the correct answerregarding the logical flow of the argument, the only region that demonstrated increasedactivity in the brain was RVLPFC.

Financial Self-control

Adults are quite good at passing Mischels marshmallow test; however, they failan analogous test easily. In studies of temporal discounting, individuals indicate whetherthey would prefer to receive $10 right now or $15 in a month. In these studies,individuals reliably prefer the smaller sooner reward to the larger later reward even whenthe best possible returns on ones investment could not match the increased financialbenefit of waiting for the later reward. The first neuroimaging study to examine temporaldiscounting (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004) observed increasedactivity in RVLPFC when individuals selected the larger later rewards, presumablyinhibiting the impulse to take the immediate reward. A subsequent study (Boettiger etal., 2007) created an index for each participant based on their overall tendency to takeone kind of reward or the other. In this study, the only region that was associated withthe tendency to take the larger later reward with RVLPFC. Although there have onlybeen a few studies on financial self-control, they suggest that RVLPFC may play a keyrole.


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Emotional Self-control

Emotional self-control is more typically described as emotion regulation andalong with motor self-control is one of the most researched forms of self-control bothbehaviorally and neurally. There are several different strategies that people apply in

order to regulate their emotions including distraction, detachment, reappraisal, andsuppression (Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Across the few dozen neuroimaging studies thathave been conducted, three regions are pretty reliably associated with attempts at emotionregulation and the success of those attempts: RVLPFC, left ventrolateral PFC, anddorsomedial PFC. In one review of this literature (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009),RVLPFC was found to be most frequently associated with emotion regulation processes.

Perspective-taking Self-controlIn some ways, the self-control involved in certain forms of perspective-taking is

the most intriguing form of self-control to consider. It is intriguing because it is sodifferent than the others forms of self-control and could easily be forgotten as a form of

self-control. A good deal of perspective-taking does not involve self-control, but at leastone relatively common form of perspective-taking does. Self-control is involved whenyou, the perspective-taker, have a competing perspective with the person you are tryingto take the perspective of.

The data on this is still very sparse with the main finding coming from a singlestudy with a patient who has selective damage to RVLPFC. This patient was tested onvarious forms of perspective-taking and its clear that his basic capacity for perspective-taking is intact. However, when the patient has his own immediate perspective onsomething that needs to be inhibited in order to appreciate someone elses perspectivethat differs from his own, he is at a loss. For instance, if he is told that two people arewatching a soccer match and Ben is rooting for Team A whereas Dan is rooting for TeamB, he has no problem at all identifying how each would feel after Team A scores a goal as long as he has no stake in the outcome. If it turns out that Team A is the team that hehimself roots for, he then mistakenly believes that both Ben and Dan will feel the sameway he feels when Team A scores. So he can engage in perspective-taking but only ifthat does not require setting aside his own perspective on things. Given that his damageis almost exclusively to RVLPFC, this is important evidence that RVLPFC is involved inthis rather abstract form of self-control.

A recent fMRI study backs up the results of the patient study. In this new study,participants looked at images of needles or cotton swabs being applied to anotherpersons hand. The needles look like they would hurt whereas the cotton swabs do not,however, on some trials of the experiment participants were told that the hand wasanesthetized and thus the need would not hurt and on other trials, participants were toldthat the cotton swabs contained a chemical that would be painful to the skin. So on mosttrials, ones own perspective is aligned with and would not compete with the targets needles hurt and cotton swabs do not. However, on some trials, the participants neededto inhibit their own immediate response to be able to empathize with those receiving thepainful cotton swab and to not be so concerned over the needle going into theanesthetized hand. On these latter trials, there was increased RVLPFC. In other words,when participants needed to inhibit their own pre-reflective responses to appreciate


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anothers perspective, they recruited the same brain region involved in all the other formsof self-control that we have considered.

The Brains Braking System

The results across all of these domains of self-control clearly point to RVLPFC asa hub involved in virtually every form of self-control no matter different the forms ofself-control feel or how distinct the demands necessary to achieve self-control in each.Consequently, it is appropriate to refer to RVLPFC as the brains braking system. As Imentioned earlier, there are different brain regions involved in each type of self-control,however, only RVLPFC seems to be involved in every identified form of intentional self-control.

If this account is correct, it suggests that each time we engage in self-control, weare activating a system that might cause several kinds of self-control simultaneously.Turning on this system might put the brakes on any prepotent responses or cognitions thatare currently active. Of course, this is not how self-control feels. When we try to inhibit

one of our responses, it feels like we target just that response to be controlled and othersare unaffected. Elliot Berkman, Lisa Burklund and I (2009) conducted a study to find outwhat was really happening.

In our study, participants performed a go-nogo task, similar to the ones describedearlier. On some trials, participants were trying to inhibit a motor response and on sometrials they were not. Instead of using letters to cue go and nogo trials, we used faces; inany block of trials, one gender was the go cue and other gender was the nogo cue.Critically, the faces were emotionally expressive and thus likely to produce limbicactivity (e.g. amygdala activity). At no time were participants trying to inhibit theiremotional response to the pictures and the emotionality of the pictures had nothing to dowith the go-nogo task (i.e. paying attention to the emotions would not help a participantfigure out if the trial was a go or nogo trial). Nevertheless, when participants saw a nogocue that happened to include a negative emotional expression, their attempt at inhibitingtheir motor response produced an unintentional side effect their amygdala response tothe negative expression was also inhibited. Moreover the magnitude of the amygdaladecrease was associated with the magnitude of the RVLPFC response during motorinhibition.

Thus, even though participants felt like they were only inhibiting a motorresponse, they unintentionally inhibited their emotional response as well. This findingmakes perfect sense if RVLPFC is seen as a common mechanism in the brains brakingsystem. Turning on the braking system for any reason is likely to have broad self-controleffects beyond the particular response one is hoping to inhibit.

Putting Feelings into Words Turns on the Brakes

Using your wordsIf turning on the brains braking system can have effects beyond those intended,

then perhaps turning on the braking system completely by accident could set self-controlprocesses in motion as well. Parents and teachers have long told children to use your


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words because it is assumed to help calm the child down when they are overly emotionalor overaroused. Its turns out this is surprisingly good advice.

We conducted a study (Lieberman et al., 2007) in which we showed emotionalpictures to participants. Sometimes they were asked to choose an emotion word thatdescribed the targets emotion (affect labeling), sometimes they chose a gender

appropriate name (gender labeling) and sometimes they just looked at the picture(observe). What we found is that a single region of the brain, RVLPFC, was more activeduring affect labeling compared to gender labeling (see Figure 2). In other words, puttingfeelings into words turns on the brains braking system. Indeed, we also found evidencethat affect labeling led to self-control effects. When people engaged in affect labeling,RVLPFC activity increased, but activity throughout the limbic system in general and inthe amygdala in particular, diminished. Putting feelings into words diminishedparticipants emotional responses to emotional pictures even though putting feelings intowords involves attending to the emotional aspects of the pictures. This is a paradoxicalresult, but it makes sense once we understand the role of RVLPFC in the brains brakingsystem and in putting feelings into words. In the absence of this neural connection, such

results sound a bit magical but neuroscience allows us to the see the brains trick behindthe magic.

Unintentional Emotion RegulationThe affect labeling data suggests that putting feelings into words is a form of

emotion regulation. The problem with this account is that affect labeling does notfeellike emotion regulation. When you try to suppress your emotions you know you aredoing it it is quite conscious. Although people sometimes put their feelings into wordsin order to generate new insights and improve their emotional well-being, we often putour feelings into words without any expectation that mere affect labeling will have anemotional benefit. Indeed, in three studies now (Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia, &Crockett, under review) we have found that people predict that looking at an emotionallyevocative image will be more distressing if they are asked to label it. This has lead us toconclude that affect labeling is a form of unintentional emotion regulation.

Learning to use your wordsCan we learn to regulate our emotions better through using our words? The

evidence suggests that we already do as we go through the preschool years. As studentsimprove in their ability and tendency to use emotional words to describe their feelings,they evidence fewer emotional outbursts and gain a range of benefits from classroompopularity to better academic performance (after statistically controlling for generallanguage improvements).

What about us adults? Can we make meaningful strides in this area? There isonly a little bit of data in this area, but the results are promising. We have beenexamining whether mindfulness meditative practice can increase the neurocognitivebenefits of putting feelings into words. Mindfulness involves a non-judgmentalawareness of what one is thinking, feeling, and experiencing which bares some strongresemblances to affect labeling. In our first study (Creswell, Way, Eisenberger, &Lieberman, 2007), we found that those who report being higher in dispositionalmindfulness showed greater RVLPFC activity and less amygdala activity while affect


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labeling compared to those reporting being lower in dispositional mindfulness. We arefollowing this up in a second study during which we providing mindfulness training toindividuals who are not experienced in this form meditation and thus far it appears thatthose getting the training are showing increased RVLPFC activity from pre- to post-training, whereas those not getting the training are not showing increases.

Conclusions

In this review, we have examined work that together suggests that RVLPFC is acentral part of the brains braking system, supporting self-control in its various forms.Neuroscience makes an important contribution here because the different forms of self-control feel so different from one another it would be easy to assume that the underlyingprocesses supporting self-control in each case have little in common. We have alsodemonstrated evidence suggesting that putting feelings into words serves as anunexpected gateway into the brains braking system, setting self-control processes inmotion without the individual intentionally trying to engage in self-control. Lastly, we

have found some promising evidence that people can strengthen the impact of puttingfeelings into words through mindful meditative practice. Of course we may just bescratching the surface. The fact that mindfulness training may produce benefits in noway means that this is the only route or the best route towards improving the functioningof this process. Nevertheless, its important to find out that this process is malleableallowing for future investigations to examine other ways in which the brains brakingsystem can be made to work to our benefit.


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References

Aron, A. R., Fletcher, P. C., Bullmore, E. T., Sahakian, B. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2003). Stop-

signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans. NatureNeuroscience, 6, 115-116.

Berkman, E. T., Burklund, L., & Lieberman, M. D. (2009). Inhibitory spillover: Intentionalmotor inhibition produces incidental limbic inhibition via right inferior frontal cortex.Neuroimage, 47, 705-712.

Berkman, E., & Lieberman, M. D. (2009). Using neuroscience to broaden emotion regulation:theoretical and methodological considerations. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3,

475-493.

Boettiger, C. A., Mitchell, J. M., Tavares, V. C., Robertson, M., Joslyn, G., DEsposito, M., &Fields, H. L. (2007). Immediate reward bias in humans: Fronto-parietal networks and a role for

the Catechol-O-Methyltransferase 158Val/Val

Genotype.Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 14383-

14391.

Creswell, D., Way, B., Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Neural correlates ofdispositional mindfulness during affect labeling.Psychosomatic Medicine, 69, 560-565.

Depue, B. E., Curran, T., & Banich, M. T. (2007). Prefrontal regions orchestratesuppression of emotional memories via a two-phase process. Science, 317, 215-9.

Goel, V., & Dolan, R. J. (2003). Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medialprefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning. Neuroimage, 20, 4314-21.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S., Pfeifer, J. H., Way, B. M.

(2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity to affectivestimuli.Psychological Science, 18, 421-428.

Lieberman, M.D., Inagaki, T., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (under review). Affect labelingis a form of incidental emotion regulation: Subjective experience during affect labeling,reappraisal, and distraction.

McClure, S. M., Laibson, D. I., Loewenstein, G., & Cohen, J. D. (2004). Separate neuralsystems value immediate and delayed monetary rewards. Science, 306(5695), 503-507.

Mitchell, J. P., Heatherton, T. F., Kelley, W. M., Wyland, C. L., Wegner, D. M., & Neil

Macrae, C. (2007). Separating sustained from transient aspects of cognitive controlduring thought suppression.Psychol Sci, 18(4), 292-297.

Ochsner, K. N. & Gross, J. J. (2008). Cognitive emotion regulation: Insights from socialcognitive and affective neuroscience. Currents Directions in Psychological Science,17(1), 153-158.


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Figure 1. The anatomical outlines of right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC)


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Figure 2. RVLPFC activity during affect labeling.

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